do-it-yourself-tex – Back to Plain XeTeX

This pack­age pro­vides a col­lec­tion of eas­ily mod­i­fi­able forms,
macros and sam­ple texts for use with plain TeX/XeTeX.

Plain TeX, as demon­strated by the myr­iad of ar­ti­cles and books
dat­ing from be­fore the ad­vent of LaTeX, is ca­pa­ble of pro­duc­ing
fine ty­pog­ra­phy. It has the ad­van­tage of not be­ing as ob­scure
as far as macros, font des­ig­na­tion etc. are con­cerned, and
this pack­age is in­tended to be an­other con­tri­bu­tion to the
reper­toire in terms of macros, forms and ex­am­ples.

XeTeX, which works with­out the
ne­ces­sity of fur­ther ma­nip­u­la­tion of clas­si­cal TeX doc­u­ments,
has the fur­ther ad­van­tage of un­der­stand­ing Uni­code, for which
many open source fonts are avail­able.
In ad­di­ton, XeTeX’s im­me­di­ate out­put
is an ex­tended vari­ant of DVI for­mat, which is or­di­nar­ily pro­cessed
by a tightly bound pro­ces­sor (called xd­vipdfmx) that pro­duces
PDF, i.e. if you type: xe­tex file_01.tex, you ob­tain:
file_01.pdf.

This pack­age pro­vides eas­ily mod­i­fi­able forms and macros which
il­lus­trate how plain XeTeX can be used to pro­duce high qual­ity
texts with such fea­tures as pre­cise font des­ig­na­tions, im­ported
im­ages, marginal notes, colour, right to left texts and syl­lab­ics.
Real ex­am­ples are pro­vided in both the TeX and PDF ver­sions.
A set of shell files, font ta­bles, and an HTML page with links
to font sources are also pro­vided.